On August 14, 2003, a software bug at a utility company brought New York City to its knees, and the resulting cascading effect ultimately forced the shutdown of more than 100 power plants (read more). Approximately 50 million people in 8 U.S. states and Canada experienced the worst blackout in North American history.

Research has been ongoing at the Department of Energy to improve our electrical grid’s reliability to ensure history is not repeated.

DOE R&D Accomplishments is a unique website and database in the OSTI collection. For over 14 years, special Feature pages have been methodically researched and useful information collected on scientists, discoveries, and historical events to include in this searchable resource. It is a rich source of DOE trivia unto itself.

The redesign of OSTIblog makes it easier to find and view blog articles. The OSTIblog home screen now displays the title, image and opening paragraph for the last five articles. Earlier articles can be paged through, again viewing five per page.

Throughout our history, the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) has worked to make authoritative science information ever more efficiently available to researchers and the public alike. Our core mission – ensuring access to and preservation of U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research results – has not changed. But the technology we apply to that mission has changed a lot over the past 20 years. By adopting Internet technology carefully and early, pioneering new advances in that technology to meet our needs and partnering with other stakeholders in the scientific and technical information community (STI), OSTI aspires to achieve our mission better than ever before.

OSTI’s involvement in public access is accelerating! The week of June 24th, 2013, The White House recognized Champions of Change: Open Science at an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. OSTI’s Director Walt Warnick was invited to nominate individuals who had been instrumental in championing public access to open science. As a result of Walt’s involvement in Public Access to scientific information, he was invited to attend this important event. Two notable Champions of Change who were honored were Jack Andraka, a Maryland high school student who at age 15 created a novel paper sensor that detects pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer in 5 minutes for as little as 3 cents; Jack has a huge Twitter following and is a passionate speaker about open access, STEM education and universal Internet availability. The other is Paul Ginsparg who created arXiv.org, an open access e-print network that serves as the primary daily information feed for global communities of researchers in physics, mathematics, computer science, and related fields and is the most popular e-print server in the world.

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